At first, this seemed weird and slightly invasive, but reading into it, it became a lot more awesome. With Auto Shazam, you are able to automatically record music while you’re watching tv, movies, or just driving in your car. You’re also able to turn OFF the Auto Shazam, so it’s less privacy invasive!

Are you STILL procrastinating on gifts? iTunes has a cool option to gift individual songs and whole albums to the ones you love. You can create a cool mixtape and send that off to your friends! In a band? Why not nudge your fans to gift your album to everyone they have ever met?

Kind of like the now-dead Turntable.fm, but also not! Really beneficial for EDM artists, but other genres can take advantage of this too. Hold listening parties, interact with fans, use this as another marketing/promotion tool!

Act locally, think globally. That is what Mike Rubini, and Italian jazz artists, is trying to get across in his piece with Music Think Tank. Good read for the importance of new media and how to market yourself through building teams, branding, marketing, and testing.

What good news round-up would we be without mentioning Beyoncé and her surprise release? If you haven’t heard of her quite album drop, educate yourself. A lot of places won’t sell her physical album because of the digital release happening first, but we doubt she’ll lose money on it. She IS Beyoncé, after all.

Check back every week for our weekly web roundup. Have any hot tips or web content you think is worthy? Send it our way to michelle@bandsonabudget.com or link us in on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/bandsonabudget